Pepper's American Cousin
by Marie Suzette
Summary: Pepper's American cousin Mary Sue comes to visit and gives her a makeover. Yes, you read correctly. This IS a MarySue.


Summary: Pepper's American cousin comes to visit and chaos ensues.

The first time Pepper'd ever heard of her cousin Mary was when she was five. She had returned home from her first day of kindergarten with a black eye and a note from the teacher, and her mother had sighed and said, "Your cousin Mary is a perfect angel. Why can't you be more like her?"

The summer Pepper turned seven, she visited America for the first and only time with her parents. She stayed three days at her aunt's house and met her cousin Mary for the first time. The end of those three days found Mary's face being ground into the mud by Pepper's little sister while Pepper bravely held her own against Mary's two older brothers. Her mother, shocked and embarrassed, murmured something to her sister about an emergency back home and they made a quick escape. They were never invited back.

The summer Pepper turned fifteen was the summer the Them were having the most problems, and the _last_ thing she needed was a visiting cousin from America. The reason behind the visit was somewhat vague (whispered behind doors, and from what she gleaned, Mary was no longer a "perfect angel"), and had involved a certain deal of unexplained smugness on Pepper's mother's part. But some things just could not be helped. As Pepper best understood it, Mary was involved in Something Dangerous and she needed to leave town for a while.

And that was the reason Mary Susan Getman was now standing in Pepper's doorway with three large suitcases and a gleam in her eye. "This place is lovely," she declared in what she must have thought sounded like a British accent. "It's so quaint." Pepper winced at Mary's failed attempt to sound British. "It's like something out of the 1950s."

Pepper ignored Mary's condescending comments and instead gestured to the cot on the other side of her room. "You'll be sleeping there." And then she left the room, already late to meet Them.

Later that night, when Pepper returned after a very trying afternoon with Brian and Wensleydale both trying to sound suave and "pick up some hot chicks, as your American cousin would say, eh?" and Adam being his usual self and trying to ignore the fact that they had developed hormones and every female of suitable age within three miles had an unrequited crush on him, and Pepper wondering whether Brian actually thought that just because she was "one of the guys," she would agreed that there "weren't any hot chicks here," after all of the effort she had put into not blowing up at the rest of the Them for being so _stupid_ (perhaps they would get better after puberty was over?), the last thing Pepper needed was a lecture from her mother on the rudeness she had exhibited towards her visiting cousin and …

"What is this?" Pepper asked, nearly shuddering. Her room looked like a suitcase had exploded in it. Skimpy garments of various garish shades, undergarments of the sort that must have been very uncomfortable to wear, and magazines with articles like _Are you a good kisser? Take our quiz and find out!_ were all over the room. The bathroom had seventeen different cases of makeup lying on the sink and fifteen cases of nail polish. There was more pink than she was accustomed to, and far more clutter.

"Pippin! You're home." Mary's smile was bright and fake.

"My name is Pepper."

"Pepper. How do you like the redecorating your room has undergone?"

Pepper wondered for a brief moment whether Mary was really that stupid, whether she really believed putting lace undergarments and pink … things on everything counted as redecorating, or that Pepper would be _happy_ about it. Surely not. "What have you done to my room?" Pepper demanded.

"Simple good taste and an eye for color," Mary beamed. "You like it, don't you?"

"No!" Pepper spat. Her room was pink! And messy!-1-

---  
-1- Not that her room was usually clean ... but she didn't leave her bras all over the floor, either!

"You'll like it eventually," Mary promised (rather ominously), unperturbed. "Now, I was thinking that since your room had a makeover, I should give you a makeover as well."

"What? Are you out of your mind?" Pepper wondered if the reason her cousin had been sent here was to rehabilitate as she recovered from some kind of mental illness.

"That sounds like a wonderful idea," Pepper's mother said from behind Pepper, startling her.

"Mum! When did you get there? And no, a makeover is not a wonderful idea."

"What else were you going to do tomorrow?" her mother pointed out.

"I was going to go out with Them," Pepper said, the "What else?" remaining unsaid.

"Well, then you can introduce your cousin Mary to Them. I'm sure you'd all have fun together." Pepper wondered if her mother really thought this, or if she was getting some sort of sadistic pleasure out of this.

"Please, call me Mary Sue," Mary corrected. "All my close chums do." Again with the fake British accent. "And I'd love to meet … er, them."

"That's okay," Pepper said. "I'll stick with the makeover." For some reason, she had the feeling that if Mary Sue met Them, there would be Consequences.

And that is how Saturday morning found Pepper being woken at an obscenely early hour so Mary could give her a complete makeover ("Because your pores are always clearest in the early morning!" - was this a different language?) involving lots of peculiar instruments, bright colors, medieval-looking torture devices, and hot wax. We shall skip over the exact details of the inevitably painful makeover and leave it to your imagination, but the end result was a primped and polished Pepper with poufy hair and purple eyeshadow and perfectly pouting -2- . This was also a very pissed-off Pepper. A pretty one, nonetheless. For a given value of pretty.

---  
-2- And, it seems, a penchant for alliteration.

"Are you happy now?" Pepper asked her cousin irritably. "Can I take off all this gunk you've put on my face?" Her hand inched over to the paper towels, only to be captured by Mary's perfectly manicured ones.

"Of course not. What good is a makeover if nobody sees you? We'll have to show your new and improved self to some of your friends. I mean, best buds. That's what they say here, isn't it?" Mary beamed.

Too panicked to correct Mary's mistaken impression of British slang, Pepper instead backed up with no little amount of trepidation. "No. I have no intention of appearing in public like this. _Especially_ not in front of Them."

Mary shrugged. "Or we could go into the city. Of London. And go clubbing. Or something."

"Mary, you're not in America anymore. You don't go ... clubbing here in England." At least, _she_ didn't think so.

"Not here," Mary corrected, and a quizzical frown crossed her brow. "But in London, surely, things are less old-fashioned ... You know, a lot of things here are kind of ... off. It's like someone had an idea of what life should be like, and designed the countryside to match. It's ..." She trailed off, as if she could see the shadow of a thought, but couldn't quite see the thought itself. "It's not very ... modern ..." She searched for the right word.

Pepper had a good idea of what was behind the "off-ness." The whole business with the Apocalypse taught her, if nothing else, that it was better not to question the Doings of Adam, and cut off her cousin's train of thought. "How about I show you around town," she proposed instead. "If I wear sunglasses, and look like this, I'm sure nobody will recognize me." Nobody had _better_ recognize her, that was for sure.

Distracted, Mary smiled. "That sounds like a marvelous idea."

Pepper gritted her teeth and smiled. "Of course."

We'll avoid describing what Pepper and Mary wore, as I'm sure your ample imaginations can provide you with descriptions more vivid than mine. Suffice to say, the two of them turned several boys' heads, and turned several girls green with envy (most of them weren't allowed to show that much skin).

And it was just Pepper's luck that within half an hour of the tour, she and Mary ran into Them-3-. Her quick attempts to backtrack and go in another direction failed when Brian let out a loud wolf whistle-4- and Mary stopped to revel in some attention. Pepper sighed a deep breath before turning to face the oncoming Them.

---  
-3-Not literally.  
-4-Brian had been practicing his wolf whistles. Pepper had once stumbled across him practicing his wolf whistles on birds, and it had been weeks before he convinced her of the purity of his attentions when it came to wildlife.

Of course they didn't recognize her. Pepper had never worn a dress, makeup, and sunglasses in front of them before. She didn't know whether to be offended or relieved. Brain continued to chat up Mary, who was very susceptible to his compliments. Wensleydale just stood there looking awkward, occasionally addressing the odd, shy compliment to Pepper, who was still pretending she wasn't Pepper in the hopes that this would end without any major humiliation on her part.

And then Adam turned to her and said, "Why are you in that getup, Pepper?"

And Wensleydale said, "But she's not Pep- oh."

And Brian, who was always slow on the pickup, turned and said, "_Where_ is Pepper? I thought she said she was busy with her American cousin Mary today ... oh."

And Pepper, who had enough with all of this uber-girly business, grew very upset. "I'm just showing my cousin around town, Adam," she said challengingly.

"Why are you wearing a dress?"

"Because .." At this, Pepper faltered. "Because I'm a girl and occasionally..."

"And occasionally, a girl wants to get in touch with her inner feminine mystique, no matter how much of a tomboy she may appear," Mary supplied, sensing an interesting subtext in all this. This had all the makings of a potential love quadrangle if things were handled badly. And Mary loved handling things badly.

Pepper shot Mary a dirty look. "Because I want to."

Mary went on blithely. "Now tell me the truth. Which one of you three has a crush on my cousin here? Come on, you can share."

Pepper kicked Mary subtly with her many-inch heels and pasted on a fake smile. "Mary and I have to go now."

"What do you mean, crush?" Wensleydale asked, confused.

"On _Pepper_?" Brian asked, somewhat incredulously.

"I'm going to marry her someday, if that's what you mean," Adam said coolly.

There was silence.

"We're going now," Pepper said firmly, dragging Mary with her. "I'll see you guys soon. Mum's taking Mary to see the sights in London in a couple of days, and they'll be touring all of England for a while, so I'll see you guys then. Until then, I'll just be keeping Mary here out of trouble." There was a slightly hysterical quality to her babbling as she pulled Mary away.

When they got back, and Pepper's mom brightly asked, "How was your first outing together?" ... well, Pepper's only answer was a slam of her door. Mary's "I don't know what wrong with her, maybe she didn't like being proposed to?" wasn't much help. Pepper's mother never did figure out what had happened, but she learned enough that she sent Mary back home to America sooner than either her sister or her niece had expected. The next day, Pepper met Them in what she usually wore, and cheerily pretended the previous day had never happened.

The Them followed suit, feeling that this was one of the instances where not following Pepper's lead would result in serious bodily damage.

Ten years later, at Pepper's wedding reception, she had a close talk with several people.

Brian's went something like this:

"So do you remember ten years ago, when my American cousin visited?"

"You have an American cousin?"

"Yes, her name was Mary Sue. And you were getting pretty comfortable with her."

"I was?"

"And she said- are you drunk, Brian?"

"Is the world supposed to spin like that?"

Wensleydale's was more coherent.

"So you remember my American cousin Mary Sue?"

"Good God, she's not here, is she?"

"No..."

"Thank goodness. You were pissed off for months after the last time she visited."

"Well, she did kiss the hell out of my boyfriend at the time."

"Your ex-boyfriend. He wasn't good enough for you anyways."

"I know, that's why I dumped him. Anyways, remember her first visit?"

"Vividly."

"And when Adam said ... er, that he was going to marry me?"

"Yes, why?"

"Didn't you and Brian think that was weird?"

"No. We'd known for years that you two would end up together."

"We were 15. Years would imply ..."

"We'd always known you two would end up together."

"Even back when we were four?" Pepper asked skeptically.

"The hero gets his girl, Pepper. And he did, didn't he?"

"But-"

"It's your wedding reception. Shouldn't you be dancing with the groom?"

"Well, he is beckoning .."

As she danced with her new husband, her head resting on his shoulder, she murmured, "Adam?"

"Yes?"

"Do you remember that day, when we were fifteen, and you said that you were going to marry me one day?"

"Yes. I also remember how firmly you avoided the subject for the next couple of, oh, years."

"Why did you say that?"

"Because your cousin was getting on my nerves. Because it was true."

"You didn't _know_ you were going to marry me."

"Who else would I marry? I've loved you since I first saw you ..."

"Adam. We first we met when we were four."

"Since I first saw you beat someone up?"

"Also when we were four. Same day, remember? You were the one I was beating up."

"Yes."

"How did you know you were going to marry me?"

"I just did."

"All right."

And Pepper looked so content that Adam decided not to mention everything that was currently going wrong, like Newt and Anathema's hasty departure when their babysitter called, or Brian's unconscious form, or Crowley and Aziraphale's hasty departure in their quest to find a closet to sequester themselves in. Instead, they just continued dancing ..

Fin

a/n: It took way too long to find an acceptable way of indicating footnotes that wouldn't be cut out of my story -- it doesn't allow asterisks!


End file.
